Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 3 - Daughter of the Regiment

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 14 instruments and voices map to different locations across the body and sleeves of the garment, creating a deepened multisensory experience for operagoers. Rachel Arfa, the commissioner of MOPD (and the rst deaf person to hold the role), helped give the technology a tryout last season. She noted recently that she had arrived to the opera house with a great deal of skepticism—she has seen many different kinds of technological attempts to mirror the sensation of music— but was pleasantly surprised at the results. “The SoundShirt gave me access to the sound of the performance in a way I have never experienced before, and it honestly made my experience at Lyric even more richly satisfying,” she says. “Chicago has long been known for its embrace of innovation and for its spirit of inclusiveness, so it is tting that this technology is being piloted by one of our city’s—and the world’s—most important cultural institutions.” The journey to bring that experience to life in the audience was multifaceted, to say the least, involving not just technical challenges, but complex artistic and experiential considerations. “The software has eight audio channels, so we have seven microphones in the orchestra, and then we take a single feed of the stage mics,” Dunn notes. While that main audio feed from the stage is always in place (to keep offstage performers and backstage personnel apprised of the live action), setting up the equipment for the rest of the SoundShirt signal presented a puzzle. Head Audio Technician Nick Charlan and Audio Technician Matt Swiatkowski from Lyric’s Technical department were instrumental in nding wireless frequencies that would help the SoundShirt system avoid the numerous other signals swirling in the theater, and rigging the new microphones so as not to interfere with regular performance activities. Dunn then began the painstaking process of determining where on the shirts the various sounds of live opera would be manifested as vibration. That task was further complicated by the fact that the full complement of singers and orchestra only play all together on Lyric’s main stage during nal rehearsals for each production. As it happens, Dunn polished the settings in as diverse a crucible as you could imagine; the garments were rst ready for full live-testing last season during the rehearsal process for Bizet’s Carmen , followed by Lyric’s world-premiere work Proximity , and then the classic American musical West Side Story —works quite different from one another. “There were essentially two buckets of things to consider,” Dunn recalls. “There’s the technology. One of the rst hurdles we had to overcome was the fact there’s just a lot of wireless signal ying around a theater—public wi , wireless headsets for backstage personnel, and so on. We had to be sure that the connection to the SoundShirts would be seamless—just a few, undetectable milliseconds of lag time.” Audience members have reported a truly enhanced experience while using the SoundShirt.